The Hidden Government Group Linking JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11

Posted By Peter Dale Scott On October 5, 2014

^{[1]http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/10/05/the-hidden-government-group-linking-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-and-911/}

Captains America Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, rigged to self-destruct. By Mr. Fish

Peter Dale Scott is considered the father of “Deep Politics”— the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected, appointed and career officials who come and go.
A Professor of English at Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat, he is the author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of our country’s recent past, including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK ^[2] ; Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (War and Peace Library) ^[3]; The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America ^[4]
and  American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library) ^[5]. He is also a poet, whose long work, Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, was hailed as “the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time,” by Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States ^[6] from 1995 to 1997. 
Daniel Ellsberg said of his book Drugs, Oil and War, “It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.”
What follows is based on a recent Scott lecture entitled “The JFK Assassination and Other Deep Events”, and will be expanded on further in his next book, The American Deep State, due out in November.
***
For some time now, I have been analyzing American history in the light of what I have called structural deep events: events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, Iran-Contra, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have political consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in the mainstream media and internal government records.
The more I study these deep events, the more I see suggestive similarities between them, increasing the possibility that they are not unrelated external intrusions on American history, but parts of an endemic process, sharing to some degree or other a common source.

^[7]

A deep state event seen from deep space. New York City, 9/11. NASA Photo ^[8]

For example, one factor linking Dallas, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all four deep events of personnel involved in America’s highest-level emergency planning, known since the 1950s as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more colloquially inside the Pentagon as “the Doomsday Project.” A few of these actors may have been located at the top, as overseers of the secret COG system. Others – including some I shall talk about today – were located further down in its secret communications network.
I see this planning group as one among many in what I have chosen to call the American deep state, along with agencies like the CIA and NSA, the private groups like Booz Allen Hamilton to which more than half of the US intelligence budget is outsourced, and finally the powerful banks and corporations whose views are well represented in the CIA and NSA. But if only one group among many, the COG planning group is also special, because of its control of and access to a communications channel, not under government control, that can reach deeply into the US social structure. I discuss these matters at some length in my next book, The American Deep State, due out in November.
^[9]COG planning was originally authorized by Truman and Eisenhower as planning for a response to a crippling atomic attack that had decapitated government. In consequence its planning group contemplated extreme measures, including what Alfonso Chardy in 1987 called “suspension of the Constitution.” And yet in Iran-Contra its asset of a secret communications network, developed for the catastrophe of decapitation, was used instead to evade an official embargo on arms sales to Iran that dated back to 1979. My question today is whether the network could have been similarly misused in November 1963.
The Iran-contra misuse has been well-documented. Oliver North supervised the sale of arms to Iran by using his resources as the National Security Council action officer for COG planning, under cover of a “National Program Office” that was overseen by then Vice-President George H. W.  Bush. North and his superiors could thus use the COG emergency network, known then as Flashboard, for the arms sales to Iran that had to be concealed from other parts of the Washington bureaucracy as well as the public. So when North had to send emergency instructions for arms delivery to the US Embassy in Lisbon, instructions that directly contravened the embargo prohibiting such sales, he used the Flashboard network to avoid alerting the Ambassador and other unwitting personnel.
^[10]The documented example of Iran-Contra allows me to explain what I am saying about the users of the COG network, and also what I am not saying. To begin with, I am not saying that a single “Secret Team” has for decades been using the COG network to manipulate the US Government from outside it. There is no evidence to suggest that North’s actions in Iran-Contra were known to any of his superiors other than CIA chief William Casey and probably George Bush. The point is that a very small group had access to a high-level secret network outside government review, in order to implement a program in opposition to government policy. They succumbed to the temptation to use this secure network that had been designed for other purposes. I have argued elsewhere that this secure network was used again on 9/11, to implement key orders for which the 9/11 Commission could find no records. Whether it was also used for illicit purposes is not known.
It is certain that the COG emergency network program survived North’s demise, and continued to be secretly developed for decades, at a cost of billions, and overseen by a team including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It is relevant that the two men’s presence on the committee spanned three administrations – those of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton — even though at one point under Clinton neither man held a position inside the U.S. government. Such continuity was essential for a group so secret that few records existed of its activities. And on 9/11 COG plans were officially implemented for the first time, by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the two men who had planned them for so many years.
Whether or not they knew about Iran-Contra, Cheney and Rumsfeld were on the COG planning committee at the time of Iran-Contra. There is no such obvious link between COG planning and Watergate, but the involvement of COG personnel in Watergate is nonetheless striking. James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) that was assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.” His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’” In addition, John Dean, perhaps the central Watergate figure, had overseen secret COG activities when serving as the associate deputy attorney general.
^[11]In the case of the JFK assassination, I wish to focus on two men who functioned as part of the communications network of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), the agency renamed in 1968 as the Office of Emergency Preparedness (to which McCord was attached), and renamed again in 1982 as the National Program Office (for which Oliver North was the action officer).
These two men (there are others) are Winston Lawson, the Secret Service advance man who from the lead car of the motorcade was in charge of the Secret Service radio channels operating in the motorcade; and Jack Crichton, the army intelligence reserve officer who with Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin selected the Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald’s first (and falsified) FBI interview.
Lawson has drawn the critical attention of JFK researchers, both for dubious actions he took before and during the assassination, and also for false statements he made after it (some of them under oath). For example, Lawson reported after the assassination that motorcycles were deployed on “the right and left flanks of the President’s car” (17 WH 605). On the morning of November 22, however, the orders had been changed (3 WH 244), so that the motorcycles rode instead, as Lawson himself testified to the Warren Commission, “just back of the President’s car” (4 WH 338; cf. 21 WH 768-70). Captain Lawrence of the Dallas Police testified that that the proposed side escorts were redeployed to the rear on Lawson’s own instructions (7 WH 580-81; cf. 18 WH 809, 21 WH 571). This would appear to have left the President more vulnerable to a possible crossfire.
Early on November 22, at Love Field, Lawson installed, in what would become the lead car, the base radio whose frequencies were used by all Secret Service agents on the motorcade. This radio channel, operated by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), was used for some key decisions before and after the assassination, yet its records, unlike those of the Dallas Police Department (DPD) Channels One and Two, were never made available to the Warren Commission, or any subsequent investigation. The tape was not withheld because it was irrelevant; on the contrary, it contained very significant information.
^[12]The WHCA actually reports to this day on its website that the agency was “a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.” However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, or why it was not made available to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). It should have been.
For one thing, the WHCA tape, as Vincent Palamara has written, contains the “key” to the unresolved mystery of who, after the shooting, redirected the motorcade to Parkland hospital. The significance of this apparently straightforward command, about which there was much conflicting testimony, is heightened when we read repeated orders on the Dallas Police radio transcript to “cut all traffic for the ambulance going to Parkland code 3” (17 WH 395) – the ambulance in question having nothing to do with the president (whose shooting had not yet been announced on the DPD radio). In fact the ambulance had been dispatched about ten minutes before the assassination to pick someone from in front of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), who was wrongly suspected of having suffered an epileptic seizure.
Lawson later reported to the Secret Service that he heard on his radio “that we should proceed to the nearest hospital.” He wrote also that he “requested Chief Curry to have the hospital contacted,” and then that “Our Lead Car assisted the motorcycles in escorting the President’s vehicle to Parkland Hospital” (17 WH 632), cf. 21 WH 580). In other words, after hearing something on the WHCA radio, Lawson helped ensure that the President’s limousine would follow the route already set up by the motorcycles for the epileptic. (In his very detailed Warren Commission testimony, Lawson said nothing about the route having already been cleared. On the contrary he testified that “we had to do some stopping of cars and holding our hands out the windows and blowing the sirens and horns to get through” (4 WH 354).
The WHCA radio channel used by Lawson and others communicated almost directly to the WHCA base at Mount Weather in Virginia, the base facility of the COG network. From there, Secret Service communications were relayed to the White House, via the

batteries of communications equipment connecting Mount Weather with the White House and “Raven Rock” — the underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington — as well as with almost every US military unit stationed around the globe.

Jack Crichton, head of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was also part of this Mount Weather COG network. This was in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, “Because it was intended for ‘continuity of government’ operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment.” In retrospect the Civil Defense Program is remembered derisively, for having advised schoolchildren, in the event of an atomic attack, to hide their heads under their desks.But in 1963 civil defense was one of the urgent responsibilities assigned to the Office of Emergency Planning, which is why Crichton, as much as Secret Service agent Lawson, could be in direct touch with the OEP’s emergency communications network at Mount Weather.
^[13]Jack Crichton is of interest because he, along with DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit, was responsible for choosing a Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald from the right-wing Russian community. This man was Ilya Mamantov, who translated for Marina Oswald at her first DPD interview on November 22. What she allegedly said in Russian at this interview was later used to bolster what I have called the “phase one” story, still promoted from some CIA sources, that Russia and/or Cuba were behind the assassination.
As summarized by the FBI, Mamantov’s account of Marina’s Russian testimony was as follows:

MARINA OSWALD advised that LEE HARVEY OSWALD owned a rifle which he used in Russia about two years ago. She observed what she presumed to be the same rifle in a blanket in the garage at [Ruth Paine’s residence]…. MARINA OSWALD stated that on November 22, she had been shown a rifle in the Dallas Police Department…. She stated that it was a dark color like the one that she had seen, but she did not recall the sight.

These specific details – that Marina said she had seen a rifle that was dark and scopeless – were confirmed in an affidavit (signed by Marina and Mamantov, 24 WH 219) that was taken by DPD officer B.L. Senkel (24 WH 249). They were confirmed again by Ruth Paine, who witnessed the Mamantov interview, (3 WH 82). They were confirmed again the next night in an interview of Marina by the Secret Service, translated by Mamantov’s close friend Peter Gregory. But a Secret Service transcript of the interview reveals that the source of these details was Gregory, not Marina:

(Q) This gun, was it a rifle or a pistol or just what kind of a gun? Can she answer that?

(A) It was a gun

Mr. Gregory asked: Can you describe it?

NOTE: Subject said: I cannot describe it because a rifle to me like all rifles.

Gregory translation: She said she cannot describe it. It was sort of a dark rifle just like any other common rifle…

Subject in Russian: It was a hump (or elevation) but I never saw through the scope….

Gregory translation: She says there was an elevation on the rifle but there was no scope – no telescope.

We have to conclude not just that Gregory had falsified Marina’s testimony (“a rifle to me like all rifles”); but so probably had his friend Mamantov, who later testified no less than seven times to the Warren Commission that Marina had used the word “dark” to describe the gun. There were others in Dallas who claimed that Oswald’s gun indeed had been scopeless, until Oswald had a scope installed on it by Dallas gunsmith Dial Ryder. The Warren Report elaborately refuted this corroborated claim, and concluded that “the authenticity of the repair tag” used to support it was “subject to grave doubts.” (WR 317).
We can see here, what the Warren Commission did not wish to see, signs of a conspiracy to misrepresent Marina’s testimony, and possibly to link Oswald’s gun to a dark and scopeless rifle he had in the Soviet Union. Our concerns that Mamantov misrepresented her lead us to concerns about why two Army Intelligence Reserve officers from the 488^th unit (Jack Crichton and Deputy DPD Chief George Lumpkin) selected Mamantov as her interpreter. Our concerns are increased when we see that B.L. Senkel, the DPD officer who took Marina’s suspect affidavit, was the partner of F.P. Turner, who collected the dubious rifle repair tag (24 WH 328), and that both men spent most of November 22 with DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin. For example, they were with Lumpkin in the pilot car of the motorcade when Lumpkin was communicating with Winston Lawson in the lead car behind them.
I conclude that when we look at the conduct of the two men we know to have been parts of the COG emergency communications network in Dallas, we see patterns of sinister behavior that also involved others, or what we may call conspiratorial behavior. These concatenated efforts to implicate Oswald in a phase-one conspiracy narrative lead me to propose a hypothesis for which I have neither evidence nor an alternative explanation: namely, that someone on the WHCA network may have been the source for the important unexplained description on the Dallas Police tapes of a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight (5 feet 10 inches, 165 pounds) recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.
^[14]Note that there are no other known sources ascribing this specific height and weight to Oswald. For example, when he was arrested and charged in Dallas that same day, Oswald was recorded as having a height of 5’9 ½ inches, and a weight of 131 pounds. The first reference to Oswald as 5’10”, 165 pounds, was that offered by Oswald’s mother Marguerite to FBI Agent Fain in May 1960, when Oswald himself was absent in Russia.
The DPD officer contributing the description on the Police Channel was Inspector Herbert Sawyer, who allegedly had heard it from someone outside the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) whom he could not identify or describe. The Warren Report said categorically that his source was Howard Brennan (WR 5), and that on the evening of November 22, Brennan “identified Oswald as the person in the lineup who bore the closest resemblance to the man in the window but he said that he was unable to make a positive identification” (WR 145). But there are many reasons to doubt this, starting with conflicts in Brennan’s own testimony (as Anthony Summers reported in Conspiracy, pp. 109-10) . And Ian Griggs has made a strong case that Brennan never saw Oswald in a line-up that evening. (There are police records placing Oswald in three line-ups that day, and corroborating witness reports of them; but there is no evidence whatever that Brennan attended any of the three.)
There is another strong reason to doubt that the source was Brennan. Brennan testified later to the Warren Commission that he saw his suspect in a window of the Texas School Book Depository, “standing up and leaning against the left window sill.” Pressed to describe how much of the suspect he saw, Brennan answered, “I could see probably his whole body, from his hips up. But at the time that he was firing the gun, a possibility from his belt up” (3 WH 144).
The awkwardness of Brennan’s language draws attention to the fundamental problem about the description. It is hard to imagine anyone giving a full height and weight estimate from seeing someone who was only partially visible in a window. So there are intrinsic grounds for believing the description must have come from another source. And when we see that the same description is found in Oswald’s FBI and CIA files — and nowhere else – there are reasons to suspect the source was from government secret files.
We have seen that there was interaction in Dallas between the WHCA and DPD radio channels, thanks to the WHCA portable radio that Lawson had installed in the lead car of the presidential motorcade. This radio in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying Dallas Police Department (DPD) Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit. At the same time, as noted above, it was in contact with the COG nerve center at Mount Weather, Virginia. And Mount Weather had the requisite secret communications to receive information from classified intelligence files, without other parts of the government being alerted.

^[15]

Mount Weather COG Nerve Center ^[8]

Permit me at this moment an instructive digression. It is by now well established that Kennedy in 1963 was concerned enough by “the threat of far-right treason” that he urgently persuaded Hollywood director John Frankenheimer “to turn [the novel] Seven Days in May into a movie.” In this book, to quote Wikipedia, a

charismatic superior officer, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, intend[s] to stage a coup d’état …. According to the plan, an undisclosed Army combat unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country’s telephone, radio, and television networks, while the conspiracy directs the military and its allies in Congress and the media from “Mount Thunder” (a continuity of government base based on Mount Weather).

It is no secret also that in 1963 Kennedy had aroused major right-wing dissatisfaction, largely because of signs of his increasing rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The plot of the book and movie reflects the concern of liberals at the time about generals like General Edwin Walker, who had resigned in 1961 after Kennedy criticized his political activities in the Army. (Walker had given his troops John Birch Society literature, along with the names of right-wing candidates to vote for.) We can assume however that Kennedy had no firm evidence of a Mount Weather conspiracy: if he had, it is unlikely his response would have just been to sponsor a fictionalized movie.
It is important at this stage to point out that, although COG elements like Mount Weather were considered part of the Pentagon, the COG “government in waiting” was at no time under military control. On the contrary, President Eisenhower had ensured that it was broadly based at the top, so its planners included some of the nation’s top corporate leaders, like Frank Stanton of CBS. By all accounts of COG leadership in the decades after Reagan took office in 1981, this so-called “shadow government” still included CEOs of private corporations, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, as well as three former CIA directors: Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, and George Bush.
Alfonso Chardy wrote in 1987 that the “virtual parallel government” empowering North to run Iran-Contra had also developed “a secret contingency plan that called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA.” Subsequently North was questioned in the Iran-Contra Hearings about this charge, but was prevented by the Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Inouye, from answering in a public session.
Later, investigating the powerful COG planning group, CNN called it “a hidden government [in the USA] about which you know nothing.” James Mann emphasized its hawkish continuity, unaffected by changes of presidency in the White House:

Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.”

^[16]

Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1974

Going one step further, Andrew Cockburn quoted a Pentagon source to support a claim that a COG planning group under Clinton was now for the first time staffed “almost exclusively with Republican hawks.” In the words of his source, “You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on.”
The Pentagon official’s description of COG planners as a “secret government-in-waiting” under Clinton (which still included both Cheney and Rumsfeld) is very close to the standard definition of a cabal, as a group of persons secretly united to bring about a change or overthrow of government. A very similar situation existed under Jimmy Carter, when some of those who would later figure in Iran-Contra (notably George H.W. Bush and Theodore Shackley) worked with chiefs of foreign intelligence services (the so-called Safari Club) “to start working with [former DCI Richard] Helms [then U.S. Ambassador to Iran] and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview.” This group began by backing guerrilla forces in Africa (notably UNITA of Jonas Savimbi in Angola), which they knew would not be backed by the CIA under William Colby or Stansfield Turner.
But some of these figures, notably Alexandre de Marenches of the French spy agency SDECE, became involved with Casey, Bush, Shackley, and others in a 1980 plot – the so-called Republican “October Surprise” – to prevent the reelection of Jimmy Carter. The essence of this plot was to frustrate Carter’s efforts to repatriate the hostages seized in the U.S. Tehran Embassy, by negotiating a Republican deal with the Iranians that would be more to their liking. (The hostages in fact were returned hours after Reagan took office in 1981.)
This Republican hostage plot in 1980 deserves to be counted as a fifth structural deep event in recent US history. Unquestionably the illicit contacts with Iran established by the October Surprise Group in 1980 became, as Alfonso Chardy wrote, the “genesis” of the Iran-Contra arms deals overseen by the COG/ Mount Weather planners in 1984-86.
In an important interview with journalist Robert Parry, the veteran CIA officer Miles Copeland claimed that a “CIA within the CIA” inspired the 1980 plot, having concluded by 1980 that Jimmy Carter (in Copeland’s words) “had to be removed from the presidency for the good of the country.” Copeland made it clear to Parry that he shared this view that Carter “represented a grave threat to the nation,” and former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe told Parry that Copeland himself was in fact “the conceptual father” of the 1980 arms-for-hostages deal, and had “brokered [the] Republican cooperation with Israel.” And Copeland, together with his client Adnan Khashoggi whom he advised, went on with Shackley to help launch the 1984-85 Iranian arms deals as well.
However, just as Knebel in Seven Days may have overestimated the military component in the COG Mount Weather

^[17]

Peter Dale Scott, Russ Baker, David Talbot, Daniel Ellsberg, Jefferson Morley at a recent lunch

leadership, so Copeland may have dwelt too exclusively on the CIA component behind the October Surprise Group. In The Road to 9/11, I suggested that this CIA network overlapped with a so-called “Project Alpha,” working at the time for David Rockefeller and the Chase Manhattan Bank on Iran issues, which was chaired by the veteran establishment figure John J. McCloy.
I will conclude by again quoting James Mann’s dictum that the Mount Weather COG leadership constitutes a “permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, … a world in which Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.” And I would like this audience to investigate whether elements of this enduring leadership, with its ever-changing mix of CIA veterans and civilian leaders, may have constituted “a secret government-in-waiting,” not just under Clinton in the 1990s, not just under Carter in 1980, but also under Kennedy in November 1963.



Footnotes：
[1] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014 [forthcoming]). 1.
[2] For a partial list of anomalies between the JFK assassination and 9/11, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 341-96.
[3] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 6.
[4] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877 ^[18]: “Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.”
[5] Iran-Contra Committee Counsel Arthur Liman, questioning Oliver North, “had North repeat his testimony that the diversion was Casey’s idea” (Arthur Liman, Lawyer: a life of counsel and controversy [New York: Public Affairs, 1998], 341).
[6] James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 72.
[7] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 213-14, 219-29.
[8] Bamford, A Pretext for War, 71-81.
[9] Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23.
[10] Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16. For more on WISP, see David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973), 134-37.
[11] John Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little Brown, 2004), 120. In addition Howard Baker, in 1973 the ranking Republican member of the Senate Committee that investigated Watergate, was later  part of the COG secret leadership (CNN Special Assignment, November 17, 1991).
[12] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 142.
[13] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 9, p.106 (or 9 WH 106) ; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 119-22.
[14] “White House Communications Agency,” Signal Corps Regimental History, http://signal150.army.mil/white_house_communications_agency.html.
[15] In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008).  The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: “The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.” See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf ^[19].
[16] 17 WH 394-95, 23 WH 841; 17 WH 368, 395; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 273-74, 278. The alleged epileptic walked away from the ambulance after it arrived at Highland (Warren Commission Document 1245, 6-10).
[17] Statement of Special Agent Winston E. Lawson [to Secret Service],” 17 WH 632; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278.
[18] Richard Pollock, “The Mysterious Mountain,” The Progressive, March, 1976; cf. “Mount Weather’s ‘Government-in-Waiting,’” http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/mt_weather.htm.
[19] Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
[20] Dee Garrison , Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46.
[21] Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383-84.
[22] Commission Document 344 – SS Howard Tape Copy of 01 Dec 1963, p. 23.
[23] Lee Harvey Oswald fingerprint card, 17 WH 308. The heaviest Oswald actually weighed was 150 pounds, when he left the Marines in 1959 (19 WH 584, 595).
[24] FBI report by Special Agent Fain, dated May 12, 1960, 17 WH 706. In the same report Marguerite named Oswald’s father as “Edward Lee Oswald.” His actual name was Robert Edward Lee Oswald (WR 669-70).
[25] Testimony of Inspector Herbert Sawyer, 6 WH 321-22:  “I remember that he was a white man and that he wasn’t young and he wasn’t old.” Cf. Dallas Police Channel Two Tape at 12:25 PM (23 WH 916).
[26] Ian Griggs, “Did Howard Leslie Brennan Really Attend an Identification Lineup?”
http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/28th_Issue/id_draft.html.
[27] Statement of Secret Service Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630: “I checked with Chief Curry as to location of Lead Car [at  Love Field] and had WHCA portable radio put in and checked.”
[28] “The lead car was in radio contact with the pilot car by police radio, and with the Presidential limousine by Secret Service portable radios” (Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=16241&relPageId=27 ^[20]). Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).
[29] David Talbot, Brothers: the hidden history of the Kennedy years (New York: Free Press, 2007), 148.
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May.
[31] Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A time for choosing: the rise of modern American conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), .
[32] Hope Yen, “Eisenhower Letters Reveal Doomsday Plan: Citizens Tapped to Take Over in Case of Attack,” AP, Deseret News, March 21, 2004, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/595050502/Eisenhower-letters-reveal-doomsday-plan.html?pg=all ^[21].
[33] CNN Special Assignment, November 17, 1991.
[34] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877 ^[18]: “Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.”
[35] Iran-Contra Committee Counsel Arthur Liman, questioning Oliver North, “had North repeat his testimony that the diversion was Casey’s idea” (Arthur Liman, Lawyer: a life of counsel and controversy [New York: Public Affairs, 1998], 341). Cf. The “October Surprise” allegations and the circumstances surrounding the release of the American hostages held in Iran: report of the Special Counsel to Senator Terry Sanford and Senator James M. Jeffords of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Volume 4, p. 33 (October Surprise Group).
[36] CNN Special Assignment, November 17, 1991.
[37] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.
[38] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), 88.
[39] Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America’s private intelligence network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 61.
[40] Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, [2013]), 66-68; Elaine Windrich, “The Laboratory of Hate: The Role of Clandestine Radio in the Angolan War,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 3(2), 2000.
[41] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877 ^[18]: “The group, led by campaign foreign policy adviser Richard Allen, was founded out of concern Carter might pull off an “October surprise” such as a last-minute deal for the release of the hostages before the Nov. 4 election. One of the group’s first acts was a meeting with a man claiming to represent Iran who offered to release the hostages to Reagan.
Allen — Reagan’s first national security adviser— and another campaign aide, Laurence Silberman, told The Herald in April of the meeting. they said McFarlane, then a Senate Armed Services Committee aide, arranged and attended it. McFarlane later became Reagan’s national security adviser and played a key role in the Iran-contra affair. Allen and Silberman said they rejected the offer to release the hostages to Reagan.” [The Iranian was Houshang Lavi, and after Lavi’s death Robert Parry confirmed from Lavi’s diary that the meeting did take place].
[42] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877 ^[18].
[43] “America’s False History Allows the Powerful to Commit Crimes Without Consequence,” Mark Karlin Interview of Robert Parry, January 15, 2013, Truthout Interview, http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/13904-americas-false-history-allows-the-powerful-to-commit-crimes-without-consequence ^[22].
[44] Robert Parry, Trick or Treason, 175.
[45] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 81-83, 88. A key figure was CIA veteran and Copeland friend Archibald Roosevelt, in 1980 a Carter foe and also  employee of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
[46] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.

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The Feds Lost on Net Neutrality, But Won Control of the Internet

• By Berin Szoka and Geoffrey Manne  
• 01.16.14  |  http://www.wired.com/2014/01/one-talking-comes-net-neutrality/

Image: DrAfter123/Getty

No matter what you think of network neutrality — for it, against it, it’s complicated, who cares — the fact that a federal court just struck down most of the FCC’s net neutrality rules is clearly cause for concern.
But not for the reasons you think. Others are saying that the FCC just lost the battle but “can finally win the war” — if the agency formally “reclassifies” broadband as a heavily regulated “common carrier” (like traditional telephone services). Actually, the FCC lost the battle, but it just won the war over regulating the internet. It no longer needs to bother with reclassification, a process so difficult and drawn-out it was always a political fantasy anyway.
The FCC’s broad new powers should worry everyone, whatever they think of net neutrality. Because beneath the clever rallying cries of “net neutrality!” lurks a wide range of potential issues. Most concerns are imaginary or simply misplaced. The real concerns would be better addressed through other approaches — like focusing on abuses of market power that harm competition.
But first, we need to look at the ruling in a more nuanced way.

Here’s What Really Just Happened: Yet Another Government Agency Gets Broad Power

Berin Szoka & Geoffrey Manne 
Berin Szoka is President of TechFreedom. Geoffrey Manne is Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics and a TechFreedom Senior Fellow.

What just happened? Well, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found in 2008 that Comcast had violated the agency’s net neutrality policy statement by allegedly slowing BitTorrent traffic. The D.C. Circuit then found the FCC lacked statutory authority. The FCC responded with the 2010 Open Internet Order, which re-interpreted Section 706 of the Communications Act as a broad grant of authority. So Verizon sued. Two days ago, the court accepted that re-interpretation, which means the FCC can regulate net neutrality even though the court struck down the two key provisions of the Open Internet Order.
Indeed, the court has very nearly given the FCC — and state utility commissions, to boot — carte blanche to regulate the entire internet. And that’s the real story here.
The only real limit is that the FCC can’t overtly treat internet services like common carriers. But this limit may mean little. Indeed, the court’s ruling even lets regulators assert new powers to regulate internet services well beyond broadband… Still, putting that kind of broad power in the hands of government should trouble anyone worried about the abuses of the NSA or the prospect of the International Telecommunications Union taking over internet governance.

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Excessive Discretion

The current FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, declared he would use his new discretion judiciously, even recognizing the need to “avoid both Type I (false positives) and Type II (false negatives) errors” in assessing whether a new premium service helps or hurts consumers.
To some extent, the FCC’s newfound sense of restraint is required by the court’s decision, which hinged on a provision of the Communications Act barring the Commission from imposing “common carriage” obligations on Title I “information services” like broadband. Instead, the FCC has to leave room for “individualized negotiation” between ISPs and so-called edge providers (Netflix, Google, etc.). But the FCC can still require that, for example, premium carriage agreements be “commercially reasonable” and non-discriminatory — as it did when requiring wireless carriers to provide data roaming to their competitors’ customers (which the D.C. Circuit recently upheld). This would prevent the clearest potential problems (like, say, degrading Netflix just to favor an ISP’s own video service) while still allowing pro-consumer deals (like guaranteeing quality of service for video providers).
In short, the FCC now has vast discretion, and seems unwilling to give that up.
Instead of issuing new rules, Chairman Wheeler has declared the FCC will use its newfound powers “in a common law fashion” (as in 2008). Such case-by-case, learn-as-you-go enforcement would indeed the allow the FCC to strike a better balance. But without any clear underlying principles to guide the agency, piecemeal regulation could actually more restrict innovative deals. The FCC could exceed the “no common carriage” limit, saying no to one deal after another without a court ever getting to question what amounts to de facto common carriage. And that could be a death by a thousand cuts.

A Trojan Horse for Other Regulation?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has long supported net neutrality but nonetheless warned that it could be a Trojan Horse for broader internet regulation. Judge Silberman’s dissent said much the same, noting that Section 706 “grant[s] the FCC virtually unlimited power to regulate the Internet.”
That can’t be good, no matter how much you want net neutrality regulation.
Still, the majority of the court (and the FCC) insist that their interpretation of Section 706 is not limitless or unbounded because the FCC can regulate only: 1) Things the rest of the Communications Act allows it to regulate; 2) Where the FCC can show the regulation will “encourage the deployment… of advanced telecommunications capability;” and 3) Using regulatory methods specified by the statute: “price cap regulation, regulatory forbearance, measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market, or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.”
In his dissent, Silberman calls these limitations “illusory.” Most notably, if Section 706 justifies “any regulation that, in the FCC’s judgment might arguably make the Internet ‘better’” — what limit is there?
And the last regulatory method authorized by 706 (“other regulating methods…”) is a catch-all, with the first listed as “price cap regulation.” So… the FCC could start setting not only broadband prices but VoIP prices as well. Why not tablet prices, too?
This starts to look a lot like common carriage regulation by another name. Indeed, it’s not clear why the FCC couldn’t regulate any information services or, say, interconnected aspects of smart washing machines or Nest-like thermostats. The FCC would just need a plausible argument that it was boosting broadband demand.
Congress intended Title I as a light-touch approach to promote investment and innovation in “information services” while allowing public safety regulations like e911. Now, through Section 706, the FCC can impose economic regulation, too, so long as it doesn’t amount to common carriage — which may be no limitation at all. That’s cause for concern.

Here’s What the FCC Should Do About Net Neutrality

We’ve all heard the breathless claims of net neutrality advocates: without the Open Internet Order, Big Cable will collude with Big Content to kill the “little guys” in a digital “Wild West.”
The FCC made such claims, too. The court accepted them (in order to uphold a narrow part of the FCC’s Order) but only under the near-blind deference courts usually grant to agencies’ factual assertions. But there’s no evidence this was ever likely even before imposition of the Order. And the logic simply doesn’t hold. ISPs may want to charge for access to their users, but, in the end, just like content providers, they profit most by getting subscribers to use more of their service.
And, counterintuitively, there’s every reason to think new entrants — the little guys — would benefit most from non-neutrality: Payola (paying radio stations directly for extra airplay), for example, is frequently derided by those who misunderstand it, but it actually helps new artists break through. Sponsored data and other prioritization arrangements on the internet are just a further extension of this. The FCC’s earlier approach would have foreclosed innovative, upstart edge providers from buying the preferential treatment or “premium carriage” they might need to gain recognition and draw users away from well-established incumbents.
Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power. But instead of adopting antitrust principles, Wheeler’s case-by-case approach will probably be guided by little more than the outer boundary of avoiding common carriage regulation (if even that).
And that’s the real issue here. It’s not about what the FCC wins or loses, but that net neutrality “common law” could be haphazard and devoid of economic rigor — and, worse, that the FCC could use the same Section 706 power to regulate internet services beyond broadband. That’s where we should be focusing this discussion: the FCC’s new, sweeping discretion.

Disclosures: The authors’ work is supported by both broadband and edge providers.
Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90

SATELLITE: GOODBYE COPERNICUS, WE’RE AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE AGAIN…WELL, SORT OF…  ~ folks r u c'ing what's going ON ..here  !!!   huh

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Alchemy, Cosmic War • http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/10/satellite-goodbye-copernicus-center-universe-well-sort/

Copernicus, among many others, was a crucial part of that alchemical “transmutation of consciousness” that occurred during the Early Enlightenment, arguing, as we all know, that the Sun and other planets and stars did not revolve around the Earth. At the very beginning of his treatise, he even paid a little tribute to the Hermetica, a point not lost on other late Renaissance/Early Enlightenment figures such as Giordano Bruno.
As science and technology have expanded, scientists have gradually come to see that the Universe(or at least what we can see of it), is oddly “clumped,” with clusters of galaxies, rather than the random distribution of galaxies one might expect along conventional views of Big Bang theory. It’s as if the data was suggesting that the Big Bang was some kind of “shaped charge.” But wait, there’s more, for now that “galactic clumping” seems to be revealing even deeper cosmic structure, one that has suggested to some scientists that Earth is, indeed, at some sort of “cosmic center”, which, because of its deeply “theory shattering” nature, astrophysicists are dubbing “the axis of evil”, since it so radically challenges and overturns some of the cardinal assumptions of astrophysics thus far:
Planck Satellite Confirms WMAP Findings: Universe is not Copernican
Now there’s a lot to absorb here, so let’s break it down: 1) there is a kind of “cosmological” or better, “cosmic axis” structure; and (2) this structure is aligned to the plane of the ecliptic of the Earth-Sun solar system and (3) this structure is revealed by the distribution of “hot” and “cold” zones of the background radiation, which zones appear to be correlated to the Earth-Sun solar system ecliptic:

“Without getting overly technical, the Copernican and cosmological principles require that any variation in the radiation from the CMB be more or less randomly distributed throughout the universe, especially on large scales. Results from the WMAP satellite (early 2000s) indicated that when looking at large scales of the universe, the noise could be partitioned into “hot” and “cold” sections, and this partitioning is aligned with our ecliptic plane and equinoxes. This partitioning and alignment resulted in an axis through the universe, which scientists dubbed “the axis of evil”, because of the damage it does to their theories. This axis passes right through our tiny portion of the universe. Laurence Krauss commented in 2005:

“ But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.”

Now, while this may or may not be good news for physicists inclined toward some version of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, it does pose a significant problem, and already – as the article itself avers – some physicists see the need for “a new physics,” while the article itself concludes with its own tongue-in-cheek barb against current cosmological physics:

“The question is ‘what will modern science do now’? Will they invent additional parameters to keep the current theories alive (in addition to those already added: dark matter, dark energy, redshift as expansion, big bang inflation, etc.) or will they consider the possibility that we are in a special place as observations clearly indicate?”

A brief word about those barbs may be in order: if one goes back to the fundamental cosmological assumption of modern physics – the Big Bang – then one should expect a more or equal, or “isotropic” distribution of matter in the observed universe, rather than the structure that has come to be seen in the past few decades, with “clumps” or “galactic clusters” (I’ve always preferred some sort of “little thump” theory, which would reconcile some aspects of Big Bang and observation: after all, if one thumps something, there is a center from which the thump’s waves emerge, and matter might clump around those wave-like troughs. Such a “little thump” could also be made to correlate rather neatly with these new findings… but that’s another long story). In any case, the Big Bang cosmology is a kind of implication or legacy of General relativity, and thus, as observations pile up seemingly in contradiction to the great Einsteinian doctrine, “patches” have been added, to which the concluding paragraph of the article alludes: dark Matter, dark energy, and so on. But as the article also makes clear, some astrophycists are (finally) seeing the handwriting on the wall, and recognizing the need for “a new physics.”

So much for the hair-brained high octane scientific speculation. Now for the really hair-brained high octane speculation: Suppose, for a moment, that there are “Others” out there, fully aware of this structure, and with the technology to get from “There” to “Another There,” and suppose, for a moment, that they’re in our local celestial neighborhood. “They” would surely be aware of this structure, and so would any Other Others with similar capabilities. After all, we supposedly do not have the technology to get from Here, to There (unless one believes Ben Rich), and yet even in our backwardness, we are now aware of this strange cosmic structure that, oddly, puts us smack in the center of that “axis of evil.” So such “Others” would inevitably realize that this little solar system, a backwater on the edges of an average galaxy, is somehow like some sort of cosmological Germany, sitting smack dab in the middle of a cosmic “Europe”… it would be, therefore, a place of strategic and commercial interest. The scientists, in other words, might also have to start talking (if they are not already doing so in private), of “cosmopolitics” or “astropolitics”… In short, the game may just have become very interesting.

TIDBIT: AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF ANOTHER COPERNICAN REVOLUTION IN ASTROPHYSICS, CHECK THIS OUT…

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Tidbits • http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/10/tidbit-subject-another-copernican-revolution-astrophysics-check/

This one was also sent by several of you… it seems that someone may be trying to set the cosmological cat among the astrophysics chickens…
The Conspiracy Theorist Who Duped The World’s Biggest Physicists
Well, the idea of a “center of the universe” is, from one point of view, absurd, but from another, that suggested by “the Axis of Evil”, as per the article in our main blog today, really raises the question of a kind of “geopolitics of outer space”… and that really does set the cosmological cat among the astrophysical chickens…

Not on a Social Network? You’ve Still Got a Privacy Problem ~ ya know besides ALL the filling in your own 'controller files' &

• By Robert McMillan  
• 10.06.14  |  http://www.wired.com/2014/10/privacy-friendster/

Hlib Shabashnyi/Getty

We already know that if you use an online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data. But new academic research offers a glimpse of what these companies may be learning about people who don’t use their massive web services. And it’s a bit scary.
Because they couldn’t get their hands on data from the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn, the researchers studied publicly available data archived from an older social network, Friendster. They found that if Friendster had used certain state-of-the-art prediction algorithms, it could have divined sensitive information about non-members, including their sexual orientation. “At the time, it was possible for Friendster to predict the sexual orientation of people who did not have an account on Friendster,” says David Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher with Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university, who co-authored the study.
Garcia’s findings showed that for people in minority classes—homosexual men or women, for example—his profiling techniques were 60 percent accurate. That’s a pretty high accuracy, he says, “since a random, uniformed classification would have a precision of less than 5 percent.”
The paper only examines sexual orientation, but Garcia thinks this type of analysis could model things such as age, relationship status, occupation, even political affiliation. “Basically, anything that is already shared by the users inside the social network could be predicted,” he says.
It’s yet another reason to be wary of Facebook in particular, as the social network’s growing size, massive user database, and increasing emphasis on advertising revenue continues to worry users. Last week, a two-month-old Facebook alternative called Ello was generating 50,000 new member requests per hour—not only because it was ad-free but because it provided a safe haven for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community unhappy that Facebook forced them to use their real names. But even if they flee Facebook, it seems, the social network may still have ways to betray their privacy.

Shadow Profiles

The problem Garcia identifies lies in something called “shadow profiles,” and as a consequence, we all could be intimately profiled by the Facebooks and Googles and LinkedIns of the world—whether we agree to it or not.
Garcia says this kind of statistical analysis—essentially using machine learning to study the known tastes and relationships of one person’s contacts, and making a guess about who they are likely to be—could be used to build disturbingly detailed profiles of people who do not even use the social network. Although the Friendster data dates to the last decade, Garcia believes that Facebook could make the same type of predictions with its data—and probably do this better because it has so many more users than Friendster ever did.
We learned about shadow profiles last year when security researchers at a company called Packetstorm discovered Facebook was maintaining its own files on users’ contacts. For example, if Facebook found two users were connected to a non-member—say, bob@wired.com—it would pool other information—different phone numbers, for example—into one master dossier.
A Facebook spokesman says the company “doesn’t have shadow accounts or profiles – hidden or otherwise – for people who haven’t signed up for our service,” and a 2011 audit by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner confirmed this. But the company does store information on non-users when Facebook members import their contact lists.

‘A Major Problem’

That doesn’t sit well with everyone. “The fact that I have no control over additional email addresses and phone numbers added to their data store on me is frightening,” Packetstorm wrote in a blog post last year. The man who wrote this post, Packetstorm Partner Todd Jarvis, says that he believes that Facebook still collects this data, despite his company’s recommendation that they delete it. “As long as it exists, it is a liability in my opinion,” he says.
These types of practices worry Garcia, too, because they could be used to infer private information on existing users. Or worse, they could be used to build dossiers on people who aren’t even on the social network. Facebook may not have shadow profiles today, but it could build them. And so could other social networks. Technically, it can be done; and there’s no clear way to stop this. “This is a major problem in privacy,” he says. “These people who are getting their privacy lost have never agreed to [the social network's] terms of use.”
He thinks that because it’s such a tricky technical and ethical issue, that the only way to really protect the data of people outside of the network is through legislation. “It is not enough to get a statement from Facebook saying we promise not to build those profiles,” he says.

Facebook Won’t Stop Experimenting on You. It’s Just Too Lucrative

• By Marcus Wohlsen  
• 10.03.14  |  http://www.wired.com/2014/10/facebook-wont-stop-experimenting-just-lucrative/

Getty

Did you hear the one about Facebook charging $2.99 per month for access?
Recently, the Facebook fee hoax started circulating on, yes, Facebook, and you didn’t have to be an investigative journalist to debunk the thing. You just had to look at the company’s revenue numbers. Facebook’s 1.3 billion users are so valuable as advertising targets, the company would never run the risk of cutting any of them off with a paywall.
But, as it turns out, Facebook is willing to risk alienating its users in other ways. It also sees tremendous value in using its social network to experiment on those 1.3 billion souls—so much value that it’s still worth losing a few here and there.
If anything in recent memory comes close to validating off-repeated conspiracy theories about the motives of Facebook, it was the company’s now infamous “emotional contagion” study published over the summer. In the study, Facebook researchers tweaked the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users—without their knowledge—to see if more positive or negative updates from friends induced the same emotions in the users themselves. The outcry was swift and loud, and now, several months later, Facebook says it’s being more careful in how it conducts its research. But there’s no sign that it’s stopping.

The idea that Facebook isn’t a content-neutral communication medium like the phone or email seems to generate constant surprise and outrage.

In a blog post Thursday, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer acknowledged missteps in the emotional contagion study. “We were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism,” he wrote. “It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently.”
Schroepfer said Facebook should have considered other ways to do the study, and that the research should have been vetted more carefully by more and higher-ranking people. Over the past three months, Facebook has put clearer research guidelines into place along with a more thorough review process and more training, Schroepfer said.
But nowhere did he say that Facebook plans to stop experimenting on users. On the contrary, by setting up a system to undertake research more carefully, Facebook is giving itself cover to conduct more such research. All of which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

Not Evil, Just Business

That’s not because Facebook is somehow evil, but because Facebook is a business—albeit a business that is perpetually misunderstood. The idea that Facebook isn’t a content-neutral communication medium like the phone or email seems to generate constant surprise and outrage. To be fair to the outraged, Facebook doesn’t go out of its way to remind users that the News Feed is gamed, and it specifically does not reveal how it is gamed.
So we’ll spell it out: Facebook has every reason to manipulate the News Feed to optimize for whatever user engagement metrics correspond to the best returns for advertisers, which in turn correspond to the best returns for Facebook. And it has every reason to use other experiments in an effort to improve other parts of its operation. This is the way so many online companies work.
“Facebook does research in a variety of fields, from systems infrastructure to user experience to artificial intelligence to social science,” Schroepfer said. “We do this work to understand what we should build and how we should build it, with the goal of improving the products and services we make available each day.”

by setting up a system to undertake research more carefully, Facebook is giving itself cover to conduct more such research. All of which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

These efforts are particularly valuable to Facebook because the reach of its service is so large. It has nearly as many test subjects as China has people—a competitive advantage it’s not about to sacrifice just because its manipulations make some users uncomfortable.
Most conspicuously absent from Schroepfer’s post is any suggestion that users can opt into or out of experiments like the emotional contagion study. The lack of transparency and consent is exactly what outraged users in the first place. But it’s understandable why Facebook likely wouldn’t see traditional informed consent as an option.
Facebook’s user base gives it access to one of the largest, most revealing random samples of human behavior ever assembled. Offering users the option not to participate would undermine the quality of Facebook’s results by compromising their randomness. The reactions and behaviors of a self-selecting group that knows it’s being watched pale in value compared to 1.3 billion people un-self-consciously going about the drama of their daily lives.

Little Incentive to Change

Monitoring, manipulating, and packaging users for advertisers are among the practices that are purportedly driving 50,000 would-be users per hour to jump on the wait list for Ello, the new ad-free social network. But even if that number were in the millions, Facebook would have little incentive to do things differently.
A few weeks after the emotional contagion scandal erupted in late June, Facebook reported record revenues and profits for its most recent quarter, and expectations are high that this quarter Facebook will once again top itself. One user behavior Facebook would no doubt have little trouble measuring is whether news of its maligned research project correlated with an uptick in defections from the service or a drop in logins. If it had, Facebook might be expected to do something more drastic to curb such projects in the future.
But however more careful Facebook promises to be, its experiments aren’t going away. “We believe in research, because it helps us build a better Facebook,” Schroepfer wrote. And judging by Facebook’s bottom line, that research seems to be working.

Biden’s Admission: US Allies Armed ISIS

By Patrick Martin

Global Research, October 06, 2014

World Socialist Web Site

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: Media Disinformation, US NATO War Agenda

In-depth Report: SYRIA: NATO'S NEXT WAR?

Speaking to students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Forum Thursday, US Vice President Joseph Biden committed what the US media characterizes as a “gaffe.” In other words, he told an embarrassing truth about US government policy, one that is usually obfuscated in the remarks of government officials and the commentaries of media pundits.
Asked about US policy in Syria, Biden touched on the dirty secret of the current US-led war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS (or ISIL as the Obama administration terms it) is essentially the creation of the United States and its allies who fomented civil war in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Referring to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Biden said,

“They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad—except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

“Now you think I’m exaggerating,” he continued, to emphasize his point. “Take a look! Where did all of this go?” Biden claimed that the US opposed arming these al Qaeda-linked groups, which included ISIS, adding, “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”
According to Biden’s narrative, only in the summer of 2014 did these countries realize that ISIS was a threat to them as well as to Assad, and shifted, joining in the US campaign of air strikes against ISIS targets in Syria. He gave as an example the position of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggesting that he had admitted the error of a permissive policy towards the extremists: “President Erdogan told me, he is an old friend, said you were right, we let too many people through, now we are trying to seal the border.”
It is testament to the degeneracy of the American political system that the circumstances behind ISIS’s rise, alluded to in Biden’s remarks, have not been the subject of any investigation. There have been no calls in Congress for hearings to examine the origins of an organization whose actions have been seized on to proclaim a new war in the Middle East.
As for the media, it merely serves as a government mouthpiece. Significantly, no US media source reported or commented on these portions of Biden’s remarks at Harvard. But once the comments were publicized, first by the Russian-based RT network, then throughout the Middle East, Biden hastened to mend fences with the offended client states.
The US embassy in Ankara released a statement that Biden had called Erdogan personally to “clarify recent comments made at Harvard University.” According to the embassy, “The Vice President apologized for any implication that Turkey or other Allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria.”
Whatever the level of “intentionality” involved, ISIS was the recipient of the US-supported arms aid to the Syrian rebels, routed by the CIA through Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and other Mideast client states. The State Department and CIA were well aware that the Syrian rebels included many Islamic militants, including those linked to al-Qaeda, because it had previously employed many of these fighters in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011.
Originally established as Al Qaeda in Iraq during the eight years of warfare that followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group only took the name ISIS in April 2013, long after it had built up significant strength in Syria as part of the US-backed rebel forces fighting the Assad regime.
In other words, as Biden admits, ISIS was created by the methods pursued by the US government and its allied reactionary regimes, both the Islamist government of Erdogan in Turkey and the Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Another confirmation of this relationship came in the form of a Washington Post report Sunday on the supposedly contradictory role of the sheikdom of Qatar, another of the Persian Gulf despotisms that is a client state of American imperialism. Qatar hosts the huge Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters for US air operations in the region and the directing center of the air war in Syria and Iraq.
Only 20 miles from the base is the Grand Mosque in the Qatari capital, Doha, which “has served as a key outpost for al-Qaeda-linked rebels fighting the Syrian regime,” the Post noted, including the al-Nusra Front, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which was formerly part of ISIS until a split last year.
Despite the presentation in the Post, there is nothing surprising in Qatar hosting the US Air Force and raising money for al-Qaeda militants in Syria. As long as ISIS gathered strength in Syria, as part of the US-backed “rebels” opposed to Assad, it was encouraged in its ambitions. It was only when ISIS moved its forces back across the border from Syria into Iraq—and in particular threatened oil-rich regions in northern Iraq—did the Obama administration move against it.
The contradictions in US policy persist. Even as it seeks to forestall ISIS’s advance, the US is arming and promoting “moderate” forces within Syria that are openly allied with al-Nusra and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. The main target of American imperialism remains the Syrian government, which is also the reason why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and other countries that fostered ISIS and are hostile to the Assad regime are now supporting the operation.
The “war against ISIS,” America’s erstwhile ally against the Assad regime, is only the latest episode in the intervention of US imperialism in the Middle East, whose goal is not freedom, or democracy, or the struggle against “terrorism,” but the domination of the oil-rich region and the preparation of new and even bloodier wars against Iran and against the main targets of Washington: Russia and China.